...two adults, two kids, and all their stuff wandering the world. (Plus two in college.)

Monday, February 12, 2007

Cut The Cheese

Nah, I don't mean THAT cut the cheese. Our gardener, Paneer, quit.

Paneer is a local cheese food, similar in texture to tofu. The kids never could understand why someone would name their kid Cheese. Maybe paneer means something different in Tamil.Not that any of that matters. When we hired him, with our driver as translator, we agreed on Rs150/day. Just over $3. Trust me when I say that's a decent pay for an uneducated, untrained gardener who had never actually been a gardener before. Our driver worked with him, they have a little vegetable plit growing and Paneer's main jobs were to sweep the driveway, rake the yard and keep the grass free of snakes. He carted out a lot of tree branches and dead grass over the past 5 months.But he was hired for Rs150/day and 6 days a week. The days he showed up I tallied and paid him for at the end of the month. If there was a need to go to his village, or a string of holidays or a sick father, he didn't get paid. That's the basic method of day wages and that's what we agreed to when he was hired. At least I think so from what I gathered through Aruna. Apparently by last Friday Paneer had had enough. He waited until Mercy was gone for the day and Aruna was getting gas in the car, and he snowballed me with Tamil and broken English, a spattering of words including "father," "fever," "Rs1200," "February," "Monday" and "salary." I asked him over and over to wait until Aruna arrived so I could calrify what he was saying and/or asking, but he kept going, repeating the same words among a string of language I couldn't understand. That's my fault I know, I should be learning Tamil too not just Hindi, but suffice to say I didn't know what he really wanted.I pulled together the various words I did know and asked if his father was sick, he needed a Rs1200 advance on his February pay and would he be back on Monday? He stated he would. I don't know if he understood my summary, but we seemed to have reached as far as we could in understanding each other. I gave him the Rs1200 and noted it down in my book.Monday came, he didn't show up. Mercy didn't know why, Aruna didn't know why. Today, Mercy learned from Aruna, who learned from the neighbor gardener that Paneer had quit over the perceived unfair pay scheme.I talked with Mercy a bit and explained to her (because obviously stories get around right quick) that Paneer had been on a day to day pay scale while she and Aruna were on monthly salaries. It's what we had each agreed on. Whatever and how the neighbor pays her gardener has nothing to do with me and what Paneer had agreed to.She figured something fishy was going on. Whenever she has something up, she tells the others, and then there's always the checking up on each other. Neither she nor Aruna had been told anything about Paneer's father or his quitting. He'd been lying to me and had waited until the others were gone because they would have known.Ah, the drama. But it's no big deal, really. I wish him well in finding another job that pays the same or better for what he did here. And guess what, the driver already has someone else in mind to garden for us.Of course he does.

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The GlobeHoppers

For those wondering, Germany is 6 hours ahead of EDT.

We're a Foreign Service family currently posted to Frankfurt, Germany after having spent 2 years in Manila, Philippines, 1 year in Lome', Togo (no, not Tonga), 3 years in Chennai, India, 3 years in Virginia, and 4 years in Amman, Jordan. We'll spend 3 years in Germany to graduate the boys from high school, and our next post is TBD 2019!

I am a former Army brat (lived in Belgium, Zaire, Algeria, Niger, visited too many places to list), now Foreign Service spouse. I tag along where ever Ian takes us and try to keep the family sane. Between 1996 when we got married and 2003 when we moved to Manila we lived in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Florida, and visited several other states.

Rebecca traveled to Oman with chorus (2013), Ethiopia with Week Without Walls (WWW) 2014, Qatar with swimming (2014) and volleyball (2015), and Kuwait with basketball (2016). She also went to Amsterdam in 2017.

Rebecca and Nicholas traveled through Vietnam on WWW 2015 and Thailand for WWW 2016.

Katherine went to Kuwait with volleyball (2014) and France with WWW 2014, and did a semester abroad in Cork, Ireland in 2016. She's was in Dublin for her internship summer 2017.

Jonathon went to Kuwait with Academic Games (2015) and had a school trip to Berlin in 2016.

Ian has also been to Ethiopia (2006), Benin (2006), South Korea (2004), Liberia (2016), Central African Republic (2016), Cameroon (2016), Algeria (2017), Morocco (2017), Tunisia (2017), Turkmenistan (2017), and Suriname (2018). He also covers Sanaa and Tripoli (no travel there), Copenhagen and Accra. Ian aided after the Mumbai Massacre (2008), and also went to Bangalore and Hyderabad in India. A life goal for him is to serve in Russia or Canada, or really any place that has a decent hockey scene. He's happy that Frankfurt has the local Loewen team!